Autumnal Affect in the Poetry of John Clare

Abstract

This essay argues that John Clare's autumn poems dramatize the divide between affect, or the material intensities that condition feelings, and feelings themselves: privileging affect over feelings as the proper subject matter for a poetry of nature. What I call "autumnal affect" originates in the fact that Clare underwent increasingly severe physical and mental trauma during the period loosely between harvest and Christmas. His psychosomatic connection to autumn plays an important role in how he treats the season in his poetry. Speakers in the autumn poems tend to alienate feelings from the sensory origins and imaginative process of poetic creation.